[Foundation-l] PediaPress

Fri Nov 12 00:50:01 UTC 2010

On 11/11/10 19:47, MZMcBride wrote:
> I don't understand why this specific company/organization has been given
> special status (when there are surely thousands of companies looking to
> partner with Wikimedia). They had a custom MediaWiki extension installed[2]
> that has a very prominent place in the sidebar of one of the most popular
> sites in the world. Why?
> 
> I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia
> article. It seems antithetical to the point of the Internet and the creation
> of an online encyclopedia.

These two paragraphs contradict each other. You say that there must be
thousands of companies willing to do what PediaPress did, and then you
say that their product is pointless and you don't see why anyone would
buy it.

PediaPress developed the PDF export system (Collection, mwlib) with
their own money, and released them under an open source license. There
was nobody else offering to do such a thing. They had no way to tell
whether they would be able to recover this development cost, and their
other startup costs, from book sales. But to give themselves a
fighting chance, they negotiated with Wikimedia to get sidebar placement.